Republican Leaders Search for New, Winning Strategy

By

Neil King Jr.

Updated Jan. 24, 2013 8:11 p.m. ET

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Republican Party leaders, gathering for the first time since their stinging election losses in November, have many explanations for what ails the GOP, but so far no clear consensus on how to fix it.

Meeting under the banner "Renew, Grow, Win," members of the Republican National Committee said the GOP must figure out how to reintroduce itself to the electorate without diminishing its core beliefs. WSJ's Neil King reports. Photo: Getty Images.

Meeting under the banner "Renew, Grow, Win," members of the party's main steering organization, the Republican National Committee, said the GOP must figure out how to reintroduce itself to broad segments of the American electorate without diminishing its core belief in low taxes and limited government.

"In many ways, we're at square one," said Glenn McCall, a South Carolina committeeman who is part of a task force on a new way forward for the party. "There are large portions of the population—African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, young voters—who simply don't know us. We have to change that."

ENLARGE

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal: GOP must be known as the 'growth party.'
Associated Press

With Republicans looking beyond Mitt Romney's loss to President Barack Obama, one question is whether to put more focus on the crop of governors who are moving to cut taxes and pursue conservative visions in their states. Some here say that while House Speaker John Boehner and congressional Republicans are right to hold firm for spending cuts, budget brinkmanship with Mr. Obama could damage the GOP brand.

"The power of what we do is in the states. The governors are the real face of our party," said Sally Bradshaw, a Florida GOP operative who is advising the RNC. She said Republicans must work to get voters to look beyond Washington.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is hoping to slash his state's income-tax rates this year, hammered that point home in a speech to the RNC Thursday evening, warning that the GOP can't be known as the "austerity party" and must instead be the "growth party."

The party, he said, needs "to reorient our focus to the place where conservatism thrives—in the real world beyond the Washington Beltway." That means sticking to conservative principles while also changing "just about everything else we do," he said.

A.J. Spiker, the GOP chairman in Iowa, said Mr. Boehner and House Republicans "have to be careful" in how they handle the debt-ceiling face-off. "But if they don't hold the line on spending, people will continue to leave the party," he said.

Mr. Boehner and his House GOP colleagues seemed to show such caution Wednesday when they delayed a fight with Mr. Obama on the debt ceiling while vowing to use other mechanisms to press for deep spending cuts.

Huddling in the corridors between private strategy sessions, state party chairmen and other GOP leaders ticked off a list of changes the party must make in how it communicates with voters and goes about selecting its presidential nominee.

To a person, conservatives here spoke with awe of how superior the Obama campaign was last year in terms of its ground operations, its contacts with voters, and its far more effective use of campaign cash.

"It's not that we did so badly. It's that the Democrats outdid us on every front, and we have to learn from what they did and figure out how to leapfrog them in time for the next election," said Mike Duncan, a former RNC chairman and current committeeman from Kentucky.

The party is debating an array of basic changes, from shortening its primary calendar to moving its convention to earlier in the summer. Many are calling for the party to cut its ties with some campaign consultants and to avoid expensive TV advertising in favor of more ambitious get-out-the-vote efforts.

One thing that appears clear from the RNC gathering is that there appears to be little appetite for policy shifts toward the political center, of the type Democrats pursued leading up to Bill Clinton's win in 1992.

"We are going to have to find a nominee who can talk to the heart, who has walked the aisles of Wal-Mart and understands the people there," said Mr. McCall of South Carolina.

Republicans decided to hold their winter meeting in North Carolina partly to recognize that it was the only swing state to fall into the Romney column in November. The session is taking place across the street from where the Democrats nominated Mr. Obama in September.

On Friday, the current RNC chairman, Reince Priebus, is expected to win easy re-election due in large part to his success in turning around the group's shaky finances.

But to underscore just how basic the party's renewal push is, the RNC has created a new website that includes a survey designed to assess whether conservatives think the GOP's main challenge is demographic, tactical, or a matter of the party's own positions.

The survey concludes by asking, "Do you have any other advice you would like to offer the Republican Party?"

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